Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!: The Story of Pop Music from Bill Haley to Beyoncé

From its lazy title, you might think that Bob Stanley's Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! is little more than a fan boy's pastiche, a golden-oldie scrapbook alluding to Beatles hits and well-worn pop music anecdotes. Well, let's be clear: No! No! No!

Stanley's 500-plus-page tome is a landmark celebration, rumination and encapsulation of just about everything worth knowing – and arguing – about the pop landscape that many of us have lived in since the 1950s.

While baby boomers will be most familiar with his encyclopedic references to the root players of post-World War II pop, rock, soul, hip-hop and every permutation thereof, Stanley's brilliant achievement is to place it all in a rich historical context. He makes distinctions between the art and commerce of pop music that explain its sociological underpinnings, while never ignoring its basis in pure escapism and the soundtracking of our daily lives.

He writes fluidly, conversationally; the impression is of a great monologist describing from memory the impact of pop – its songs, artists and attitude – from one era to the next. The chapters are short, befitting our shriveled attention spans.

But nothing, it seems, escapes Stanley's attention, from the obscure doo-wop of The Del-Vikings' Whispering Bells or the novelty nonsense of Sheb Wooley's Purple People Eater to the grand entrances, exits and earth-shakings of The Beatles, Stones, Dylan, Madonna, Nirvana, Jay-Z, Beyoncé and beyond.

Who is this Stanley, that he should have such Shakespearean command of his characters and their local/global color? Here in the USA, he hasn't much of a profile. He's a Londoner, and he's done it all – respected music journalist, DJ, record label owner and co-founder of an influential avant-pop band, Saint Etienne. Along the way, his passion has been to pierce the surface of pop reality – and let's face it, pop is almost all surface – to examine its connective tissues.

Few pop writers bother to explain how the 1941 strike by the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP), which blocked any ASCAP songs from radio play, and the 1942 strike by the American musicians' union, which prevented new band recordings from being made, changed everything.

ASCAP was all about sheet music and established songwriters, while its rival music publisher, BMI, focused on jazz, blues and country. The strikes led to a decline of big bands and live on-air music, the rise of non-striking vocalists (like Frank Sinatra) and of small local radio stations after the war. Pop would fill the vacuum. The rest is, literally, history.

And Stanley delivers that history with a wealth of insight and erudition. He has his fearless opinions ("Elvis Presley was a deity and a comic monstrosity … tender, thuggish, generous, narcissistic, charming, sensitive, self-destructive, and paranoid") but they are dispassionately grounded in our shared experience of pop. And his Anglo roots don't result in parochial myopia.

Indeed, his knowledge and love of American blues, R&B, soul, and rap – with detailed dissections of everything from Memphis to Motown to The Sound of Philadelphia and Straight Outta Compton – are as authoritative as his on-the-ground perceptions of Britain's pop history.

Inevitably, his wistful emphasis is on vinyl records, pop charts and terrestrial radio as the great vectors of pop sensibility. And so Stanley admits to losing some interest as our streaming digital age reduces the friction of pop phenomena. Yet he has delivered – ironically, given pop's ephemeral essence – a book for the ages.